


The Third Law of Motion

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [6]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Crowley Has an Anxiety Disorder (Good Omens), Crowley Hates the 14th Century (Good Omens), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, PTSD talk, World War I, oh my god they share a bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-20 17:13:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21060248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: He can tell by the thin, stretched silence between them what Crowley is thinking. He assumes it is an approximation of,so we’re just going to ignore what I said then?Aziraphale stares down into the deep liquid of his eyes and brushes the back of his knuckles against a damp cheek.Yes. Yes, we are.





	The Third Law of Motion

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this took forever, October is a very busy month <3 
> 
> Newton's third law of motion states that "when one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body."

"And you'll always love me, won't you?"

"Yes."

"And the rainwon't make any difference?"

"No."

-Hemmingway, “a farewell to arms”

Kobarid, Austria-Hungary

The Italian Front, 1917

He was there at the beginning.

He was there when She made the sky, the universe— the great limitless nothing, velvet and vacant. She gave him a bag of starstuff then, said, _make something infinite_, and let him dip the suggestion of a hand inside— before hands had been invented— pull out the fibers, weave them into gold.

Sometimes, when the night is very cold and he allows himself to slip under the tide of sleep, he can remember what it felt like— to stand on raw firmament, the illusion of solid ground under his feet, and create something from bits of nothing. 

It is dark in Kobarid, on the Italian front, at the end of what feels like the world; the night sky twisting on, dancing without measure. The sky does not care that the Germans have invented something they call the _flamenwerffer_— that they cut the night in half with it— a knife made of fire, and spray their conflagration down trench lines, scouring the hills. 

Crowley is unafraid of fire, even as it creeps towards him. He was born, for the second time, in a vast bubbling pit of it, until his wings charred black, embers creeping into the whites of his eyes— a baptism of flame. He watches the men below as the metal tanks sputter and run out of gas, the flame dying, the night air swallowing the light.

The German night marches have been a constant, unyielding force across Europe, attacking at a time when most soldiers were desperately seeking reprieve. Sometimes the opposing side plays music at night, to boost the moral of sinking men, and the sound of the gramophones bounce off the ruined buildings where they camp, echo up into the hills.

But it is quiet on this night, quiet where Crowley crouches beyond a trench line, the jagged outline of a ruined church in front of him. There are a handful of German soldiers clearing out an Italian embankment, far beyond their own lines.

_You should be sleeping._

He summons a bit of hellfire into the palm of his hand and watches as it dances— a slow simmering waltz, another bit of something born of nothing. It is an easy thing to blow it off his palm and down the long hillside, the tiny flame jumping obediently onto the flametrooper’s back, a pant leg catching fire. There is an ensuing panic, but he does not stay to watch.

There is an angel behind him, somewhere in the waxed cotton field tent that they have strung up in the hills, surrounded by bits of rock that poke like bone through the hillside, the earth’s compound fractures.

It has been blessed with tiny comforts, as much as they can afford— a dry floor covered with carpet, a small bed for Crowley to sleep in, a comfortable chair and stacks of books for Aziraphale, an endlessly resupplying quantity of food, tea, wine.

Crowley winds himself back up their hillside, through the trees and the wet shrubs, to their hidden alcove.

“Angel,” he says, at the pale body wincing in the lantern light, “what’s wrong?”

“I’m _fine_,” Aziraphale responds, a hand clutching at his side, up under his jacket, “it’s just a scratch. Got nabbed by a bit of tree branch and slipped. So much mud, you know.”

1917 has been a wet year, raining more days than not, all across Europe. It has rained here, in this little slice of Austria-Hungary, for most of October, dousing the land in an excess of water, the hills bleeding mud. He cannot stop the heartsick stuttering in his chest— it always happens— every time he thinks of rain, remembers the floods, remembers the fourteenth century, one hundred years of famine.

Water has been a constant cementing element between them— a persistent glue. Crowley thinks of Eden, of a perfect white wing over his head; thinks of a valley floor in Mesopotamia, the ark lifting; thinks of wheat fields in England, food locked under a glass table of water; thinks of a pond in London, a request for holy water.

He has the sudden inexplicable memory of standing at the edge of a perfect flat field sometime in the mid thirteen-hundreds, looking down at his feet and seeing golden grain fields encased in shimmering flood water, like sand in an hourglass. Suspended perfect. Untouchable.

Crowley steps closer and opens the angel’s jacket, peels back the layer to see a growing red stain blossoming out from under the angel’s fingers.

“Fix it,” he says, his eyes imploring, even behind dark glasses, “please.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Aziraphale says, “it will heal on it’s own.”

“Aren’t you always the one going off about gangrene? _Fix it_.”

The angel’s shirt has not been white for what probably amounts to days, if not a full week, not since they arrived in this small mountain town. He had given up the pretense of being clean sometime after slipping in the mud for the third time in just two days.

“There is no sense in suffering, angel,” Crowley has been sequestered in these hills for too long, getting rained on, getting shot at, his patience thinner than the army-issued jacket he wore. “I would do it for you if I could.”

Aziraphale is hesitating.

“You might as well just spit it out,” Crowley says, “I know there is something you aren’t saying.”

“I… got a message from Gabriel.”

Crowley blinks, adjusts his glasses.

“About?”

The angel inhales, rain is beginning to pepper the top of their tent.

“Just checking in on things, I suppose. Asked how I was getting along. How it went in Belgium.”

Crowley forgets to breathe, to tell his heart to keep beating. Movement suspends itself in his body.

“Are they— watching you?”

He can see the Adam’s apple in Aziraphale’s throat bob with the effort of swallowing.

“I don’t believe so. But I do believe they are keeping a close eye on the miracles I perform.”

“Right. ‘Strongly worded notes’, again?” Crowley recalls.

“Something like that.”

He can feel his pulse restart, quicken, and memories, unbidden, float to the front of his brain— the tile floor under bare skin, Aziraphale’s voice saying _I’m worried I’ll like it too much_, those thumb-shaped imprints on the small of his back. Despite himself, arousal flares somewhere in the pit of his belly, low and heavy, a burden to be carried.

Crowley looks at him, Aziraphale sitting on the bed that he never uses, the determined set of his chin, the worry in his eyes. Aziraphale is an anxious creature, uncertain even at the best of times. Crowley tries, often, to relay those worries, to brush a hand over the anxious sweep of his mind.

He doesn’t often succeed.

“We will be more careful,” he says, wanting so badly to reach up and smooth the creases on the angel’s forehead, kiss at the damp hair, “with the miracles. Don’t perform any on my account.”

A sigh releases from him, the shoulders dropping.

“Will everything be ok? Do you think?”

Crowley recalls their first meeting on the garden wall.

“I’ll make sure of it,” he says.

Aziraphale allows himself to slouch into the bed he is sitting on, running a hand over the coverlet. Crowley reaches, grabs at a slim-pale wrist, feels the pulse hammering away underneath.

“Now please, if you would, _fix this._”

He presses the hand into the scratch at the angel’s side, and Aziraphale’s eyes blow wide, grey in this light, threaded with bits of green and gold. Crowley is suspended in them, held captive as the angel’s skin knits together under their hands. He feels the hum of holy energy through the thin shirt, a tickling burn. He ignores it, holds his hand there until he is certain that the skin underneath is mended together, back to perfect, before he lifts the edge of the angel’s shirt anyway, checking for himself.

The skin there is smooth and white and flawless, dusted with fine golden hairs. There is just the rapidly darkening line of the abrasion, a question mark healing itself. Crowley thinks of his own scars, how they will always remain— healed by time and nothing else, jagged lightning bolts streaking across the pale sky of his skin. More bits of something made out of nothing.

He releases a long breath, smoothes down the angel’s shirt.

“_Thank you_,” he says, “no sense in _both_ of us suffering out here.”

Aziraphale sniffs, “really, Crowley you didn’t need to come out here—“

“I’m not leaving, angel,” he interrupts, his voice sharp. _Not again. Not since Passchendaele, I don’t ever want to walk in on that look in your eye, see the light dimming there—_

_“_But I thought the entire _point_ of the Arrangement was that _one_ of us wouldn’t have to oh, how did you put it— ‘work in very damp places’?” Aziraphale smoothes his hands over his thighs.

“I don’t care,” is the only retort Crowley can invent, turning to pour himself a drink.

“And I _lost_ the coin toss…” Aziraphale says, looking primly down at his shoes.

“I know,” Crowley says, popping the cork on a wine bottle, “if I was a better demon I would’ve rigged it.”

Crowley has known Aziraphale long enough— _six thousand years_— to decipher his cagey silences, his acute lack of looking at him. Crowley narrows his eyes.

“What did you do?”

Aziraphale fidgets in his jacket, pulls at the corners.

“I suppose it would be a bad time to tell you that I gave you a weighted coin?”

“A _what_?”

_“_A weighted coin—“

“I _know_ what a weighted coin is Aziraphale I’m more perplexed at why you gave one to me and then _bet on the losing side_.”

There is a fine bead of something— rainwater, perhaps— hovering along his hairline. Crowley has the striking desire to lick it off.

“I—“ he can see the angel’s throat work, the shifting of grey eyes, “I do not like how it has become a habit for you to put yourself in dangerous scenarios.”

“Angel, this is the middle of a damned _war._ _Everywhere_ is a dangerous scenario.”

“I manage just fine.”

“Well,” Crowley rubs at his forehead, “you have a particular skillset that enables you to stay behind the fray. My head office gives me work that requires a bit more time on the front lines.”

“You could’ve stayed in London,” the angel protests, “I could’ve done whatever needs doing here. It’s not as though we are down in the trenches the entire time.”

Crowley slumps onto the bed next to him, his wine splashing up perilously to the edge of the glass.

_How do I tell you that I cannot let the skepticism creep back into you? How do I tell you that the most scared I have ever been was in your bathroom of all places, listening to you ask questions I used to ask too?_

“I was assigned to cause chaos with the flamethrower unit. How were you planning on making it look like an accident? Can you do this?” He pulls a small, licking flame from the firmament into his palm.

Aziraphale leans back unsteadily.

“Sorry,” Crowley says, and the flame vanishes, “I shouldn’t have—I forgot—“

“It’s fine.”

Crowley edges his hand under his thighs, thinks about holy water.

_“_I could have figured something out, you know,” Aziraphale says, “I’m not afraid of fire. I _did_ have a flaming-sword once.”

Crowley gives him a crooked smile, “as if I could forget.”

“I do wonder where it ever went,” Aziraphale muses, and walks to their makeshift kitchen, “drat. My tea has gone cold again.”

He is holding a white tea cup in his hands, small and delicate, not the kind of drinking vessel one would _ever_ find in a war-zone.

“Well, yeah, it’s fucking _miserable_ out here,” Crowley remarks, rubbing his free palm along his arm, “cold, _wet_, windy.” He makes a noise of disgust into his wine, toeing out of his boots, “all of my _least_ favorite weather phenomena.”

“I suppose it is a bit dreary. I hadn’t really noticed,” Aziraphale sits back on his chair, and the glow of the lantern above him turns his hair into a golden halo around his head. “Been so preoccupied with whats going on down there,” he nods at the exit of the tent, at the drop-off of hill to the soldiers below.

“How bad is it?” Crowley asks, shrugging out of his jacket.

“Dreadful,” Aziraphale says, taking another sip, “the military’s idea of _dinner_ should be considered a war crime.”

Crowley wants to laugh at how the angel manages to be _fussy_ at a time like this but can’t, and finds the humor dying in his throat.

Aziraphale continues, “speaking of which, food supplies are running low for the Germans.” He shakes his head, “and the Italians are thinking of falling back yet again, this time over the river.”

An involuntary shiver runs down Crowley’s back. Demons, as a rule, tried to avoid crossing over moving water.

“The food stores are low?” He asks, trying not to think about famines, about wheat fields under water.

“The blockade of Germany has finally caught up to them,” Aziraphale says, “and you know, for some reason their agricultural output has been a bit hindered… it seems that they have stopped using their nitrogen stores for fertilizer and instead are using it for _explosives_.” His eyes glitter over his tea cup, “you wouldn’t know anything about that, my dear, would you?”

Crowley scratches idly at his jaw, trying to pretend like warmth doesn’t scatter under his skin when Aziraphale calls hims that. He looks up at the rainwater plinking against the roof of the tent.

“I may have _suggested_ that nitrogen could be used for different purposes, if that’s what you’re implying. But I didn’t have that consequence in mind.”

Aziraphale rubs at this temple, “you know sometimes I wonder how we’ve managed all these years.”

“Managed?” Crowley asks absently, and snaps his fingers, his clothes shifting into something significantly more comfortable, considerably more dry.

“You and me,” Aziraphale starts, looking down at his shirt until it transforms itself back to nearly new, the stains evaporating, “you always causing trouble and me always trying to fix it. Seems a bit daft.” He looks as though he has just had a revelation about himself.

Crowley opens his mouth, closes it, and finally sits on the bed.

“I don’t think either of us would be doing our _work,_ so to speak, if we didn’t have head offices breathing down our necks.”

Aziraphale looks decidedly unamused by this insight.

“Hear me out,” Crowley starts, “would you mind it terribly if you never had to perform a miracle again?”

“I…” Aziraphale stops, looking forward at an errant leaf that has blown in their tent, “of course I would mind it—“

“—No more freezing out here in _Kobarid_, no more meddling in human affairs… you could just,” he pauses, flourishes at the air, “collect books all day. Do whatever you want with no celestial stooges wondering what you’re up to.”

The wine is sitting nicely in his belly, warming him up from the inside. He pulls back the blankets on the bed and shimmies down into them, the sheets cold against his bare feet.

“Sounds pretty nice, angel, doesn’t it?”

If his voice drops into a lower octave and his tongue wraps around his words seductively it isn’t a conscious thing, merely a stretch of his demonic energy unfurling unintentionally.

Aziraphale looks as though he is considering the marvelous days of book reading, alone, cocoa in hand, an inexistent Gabriel. And then he snaps out of his revere, pinning Crowley with an unamused look.

“Stop _tempting me_, you wily serpent.”

It is said with a certain degree of fondness, a kind upward twisting of the angel’s lips.

Crowley shifts under the blankets, trying to get warm.

“I’m just saying that we have more in common than you think.”

Aziraphale dims the lantern behind him, opening a book on the arm of the chair.

“Go to sleep, Crowley.”

“Mmhm,” he hums, and allows himself one last look at the angel in the armchair before he closes his eyes, reaching out for sleep.

* * *

It is colder out today, but no rain, less wind. Crowley turns the sharp collar of his jacket up against the butting chill, creeping around the German camps. They are nestled in the fired-out shells of old buildings, the remnants of what used to be a town. There are papers littering the street.

The men queue at the ration lines, their clothes catching at the wind. There is an unmistakeable hollowness under their eyes, hunger having carved away at their face like a glacier, cheekbones like mountaintops.

He stands silent at the corner of a building, watching the men and their clothes-hanger shoulders. They eye him warily, and even though he isn’t wearing his black jacket, his black pants, even though he dresses to fit in with them, even though he has cropped his hair short on the sides as they do— they still make the sign of the cross as they pass him, glance at him out of the corners of their eyes, whisper under their breaths.

He sees the rations being doled out— barely a mouthful— and a chill races up his spine.

He watches them stand at their bread line, walking skeletons, wondering how, in all their hunger, they still had the will to fight.

Crowley is walking back to their encampment in the hills, a strange heaviness on his chest, a phantom weight. He rubs at it absentmindedly, pushing his hand under his jacket to scratch at the pressure of it there. But it doesn’t subside. It feels as though he has an invisible hand around his throat, a stack of books on his chest.

He stops walking and sits on a rocky outcrop, trying to breathe. His lungs feel strangely deficient, incapable of fully expanding. The thought sends a hot injection of panic through his veins.

He realizes, in the abstract, that he doesn’t technically _need_ to breathe— but _this_, this heart-sick trembling, this rising tide of oily dread, this sudden urge to gulp down air, feel his lungs expand to their fullest— consumes him, until he forgets that the body he inhabits breathes only as an accessory.

There are tiny black dots speckling the edge of his vision as he stands, forcing himself back up the hill. The weight is growing heavier, every step seems to cement it further into his breastbone, the hand around his throat gripping tighter.

He makes it inside and falls neatly to his knees on the carpet, the air wheezing in and out of his lungs. The room feels like it is spinning away from him, the world becoming something intangible— a suggestion of reality.

“Angel?” He gasps out, but there is no one here.

He lets himself fall the rest of the way to the floor, gasping for air, panic filling every occupiable space in his body until he is nothing but a mass of sweat and fear, an almanac of dread. Blackness swims at the edges of his vision, and he closes his eyes against it, drowning on dry land.

* * *

Aziraphale never really minded doing work in the midst of wars— there were always things to be fixed, bones to be set. He has a purpose in these field hospitals, even if it _is_ rather grisly. Not that the blood and the bones ever really bothered him. Angels, for the most part, were unaffected by gore.

But there is something about burns that unsettles him.

The _flamenwerffer_ was turning out to be an incredible tool of warfare— it cleared out behind enemy lines much more effectively than infantry alone, and despite the sometimes catastrophic mishaps that went along with wielding a flame-throwing incendiary device while wearing a backpack full of fuel, they were dead-easy to use.

Aziraphale loathes it.

Loathes it in a way he has never loathed another weapon— not the spears, the long bows, the trebuchets hurling rocks. Not the poison gas or the bayonets. The muskets or the machine guns. 

He has seen his fair share of abysmal wounds— the serrated blade lacerations were particularly brutal, and the ensuing infections were disastrous— but nothing creeps under his skin quite like burns do. He thinks of the wrinkled skin, the sick shine of them, the bubbling flesh.

_I wonder if he felt it_.

The thought rises up somewhere from the back of his throat as he washes his hands.

_Does he remember the pain?_

He thinks of the two men he treated today, burnt from neck to navel, their clothing melted into their skin.

_I wish I could’ve saved you_.

He cannot shake the images of those men in the field hospital, even as he ascends up the hill back to their camp. The long winding walk usually gives him time to absolve himself of the horrors of the day. But today was different, today was _difficult_. He is still thinking of burns, of fire, of endless boiling torment when he walks into the tent, and nearly into—

_“—Crowley?_”

The demon is curled into a small, bony ball on the floor, breathing heavily.

“What happened to you? Are you okay?”

Aziraphale sinks to his knees beside him, his hand hovering over a shoulder, not sure if he should touch, if the touch would even be _welcomed_ at a time like this—

“Angel?”

The dark glasses are set crookedly on his face, the corner of one golden eye opening to look at him.

“Crowley what happened? Are you hurt?”

“Can’t breathe.”

“_What_? Why not? Roll over.”

He pushes gentle hands into his shoulder, trying to ease him back against the floor.

“No, no, _no_,” comes the broken response, his arms winding tightly around his knees, his chest butterflying up and down with shallow gulps of air.

“Are you hurt?”

Crowley does the vague approximation of a head shake.

“Okay… so, you can’t breathe. Did you eat something odd?”

_Anaphylactic shock, perhaps? Does he have food allergies? Was he stung by an errant bee?_

Aziraphale’s mind is spooling away from him— _not bees, can’t be bees. I’ve seen him eat honey and he once got stung in Egypt. Or was it France?_

“No. _No food_.”

Crowley bites down on his fist at his own words, hyperventilating into his fingers. A small tear emerges out of the corner of his eye and rolls down a sharp cheek— disappears into his jacket.

“Oh, _Crowley_. Shh, it’s okay, dear.”

_Is he—?_

“No food,” he gasps out again.

Aziraphale looks at his hands, how they hover uncertainly over the figure trembling in front of him.

_Is this panic?_

He has seen men in the trenches, and later, not in the trenches, gasping for air like they were drowning, some unknown terror let loose in their souls. He has seen them panic without visible reason, watched as they struggled against an enemy only they could see.

“Crowley,” he says firmly, softly, “it’s okay, dearest. You’re safe here. I’m not leaving you.” He pushes strong fingers into the arm in front of him, runs his hands down the long limbs. Crowley quiets minutely at the touch.

“Everything will be okay,” he murmurs, and can feel the steady thrum of celestial power in his veins, a nurturing softness. He only hopes it won’t burn him— _You’re ok, I’m here with you._

“I won’t leave you,” he says again, and lays down on the floor until their foreheads are nearly touching, “I’ve got you, darling.”

That warm familiar brightness begins edging into the air, the heralding emotion that announced Crowley’s arrival long before he entered a room. _Pure, unadulterated love_. Aziraphale found it difficult to breathe around at times.

His breathing is evening out, his glasses still akimbo. Aziraphale reaches out with one hand and pulls them gently off.

“Shh,” he soothes, rubbing a thumb over a red gold eyebrow, tracing down over a cheek, “it’s okay, dearest.”

The warmth tickles in his chest with each swipe of his thumb, each whisper of his voice. The room is growing hazy around him— concentrated down to the demon in front of him, the golden glow of the lantern behind them, the warm puffs of Crowley’s breath against his hand, the room overflowing with emotion.

_I love you_, he wants to say, the thought bubbling up out of him, an automatic response. He feels the slightest bit hysterical, the slightest bit drunk.

Perhaps it is exactly _because_ of those feelings, that drunken heat, that he leans in and presses a chaste kiss to the center of Crowley’s forehead.

Crowley has kissed his forehead before— quite a few times, for any reason he could find, it seemed. But Aziraphale is another matter— always buttoned up tight, guarded. He has a duty as the responsible one, the one to rein things in, remind Crowley that there is always an eye in the sky that could find them, watch them.

_You are so reckless, my love, that I have to be the careful one._

But the way Crowley responds with that broken sound, his skin seeking his lips again, tears at him, makes him wonder if just an hour of truth between them would be worth whatever punishments heaven and hell could invent for their transgression.

“Shall we get you on the bed?” He asks softly, his hand still cupping Crowley’s cheek, fingers tracing along the edge of a delicate ear.

He can see Crowley’s throat working as he swallows, “okay.”

“Stay there,” he whispers, and then gathers himself up to his knees. It is easy enough to wriggle a hand underneath the thin legs, hook them up beneath the knees. It’s another thing to get Crowley onto his back, his arms still curled up around his chest, a crab protecting its soft parts.

But once he realizes what is happening, he opens to it like a flower, a hand lifting to weave around Aziraphale’s shoulders as he is lifted easily from the floor. The room floods with another warm wave of brilliance as he settles him onto the bed, begins pulling off his shoes.

“Okay?” He murmurs, and pulls off a sock.

“Okay,” Crowley whispers back, his one arm still tight around his chest, his shoulders hitched up to nearly his ears.

“Are you cold? What do you need?”

“Always cold,” comes the murmured reply, and Aziraphale wonders how he could feel cold when the room around Crowley is always so warm.

Aziraphale grabs at the blanket Crowley is sitting on, pulling its corners up to wrap around the shoulders that are still hitched up around his ears. He pulls the edges tight to each other, Crowley staring mutely up at him. 

“Why don’t you miracle yourself some new clothes. _Warm _ones. And I’ll set about making you some tea?”

Crowley looks small and confused and tired on the bed, the shock of his auburn hair electrically bright in the afternoon light.

“I feel like I just ran a marathon,” he says, still holding himself across the chest.

Aziraphale looks at him, the demon’s breath still unsteady, skin dewy with sweat.

“Hyperventilating will do that,” he says softly.

“What just happened to me?” Crowley is looking at his hands, blinking far more often than usual.

“They have taken to calling it _shell shock_,” he starts, turning to heat the kettle, “or sometimes combat stress reaction,” he turns to look at him again, “it’s not uncommon.”

“But I wasn’t even _in_ combat. I was just—“ it seems as though he has lost the ability to speak, his throat closing off the words before he can voice them. Crowley clears his throat, tries again, “I was down in the German camps. I drained the fuel on the flamethrower tanks, made it look like a rat had chewed through a fuel line. And then I… I—“

Aziraphale can see him swallowing, working around the invisible lump in his throat.

“It’s ok,” the angel says, putting out a hand, “you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t—“

“They were all so skinny,” he finally spits out, and then, smaller, so softly that Aziraphale can barely hear it, “did I cause this?”

“No. It’s not just the nitrogen thing,” Aziraphale says, moving toward the bed and the demon sitting on it, “it was just an unintended side effect.”

“I _did_, didn’t I?”

Crowley is staring down at his hands again.

“I caused a famine.”

“_No_. You just…” Aziraphale looks uselessly towards the ceiling, feeling his own rising tide of panic, “you just were causing some mischief. Wanted to see big explosions.”

Crowley sinks down onto his back, covering his hands with his face.

“It’s like the fucking fourteenth century all over again. Only this time it’s me. _I’m_ the _fucking _flood.”

“What are you—“ Aziraphale strides over and stares down at him, not sure what to do with himself.

“The fourteenth century, angel. The Great Famine. Surely you remember it.”

“Oh, _Crowley_ that was… that was _six-hundred years ago_.”

Crowley is just breathing heavily in between his fingers.

“You have to let this go, dear,” Aziraphale says, grasping gently at a pale wrist, “this isn’t your fault.”

“I _can’t_. I can’t forget things.”

“You _have_ to.”

Crowley just shakes his head in his hands.

“Why not?” He challenges, knowing that Crowley always rises to such things.

“Because,” comes the shaky breath underneath those finely boned hands, and Aziraphale suddenly has the sinking feeling that he shouldn’t have asked the question, “because it’s who I am, angel. It’s what we are,” he breathes in, unsteadily, “I hoard traumas and you hoard denial.”

Aziraphale sits in silence for a moment, staring down at his own hands, at the tiny angel on his pinkie ring. He spins it around until the angel is facedown.

“Well, you don’t _have_ to do that,” he says quickly, under his breath.

“Neither do _you_,” Crowley counters.

It is a rare thing to see Crowley this unhinged, this open. It happened once early on, in Rome, and then again just a few months ago, in a golden desert at night. But for the most part Crowley presented himself as the devil-may-care anti-hero of his own story, a being unrepentant and self-assured. It isn’t often, Aziraphale thinks, that he has the privilege of seeing Crowley as he really is.

_The entire beautiful mess of you._

He reaches up and grasps at the pale wrist again until Crowley slides his hand off his face, one golden yellow eye opening to stare at him.

“It’s a battle of attrition out there. Not one part of this was singularly _your fault_, do you understand?”

Crowley lets the other hand covering his face fall, blinking solemnly up at him, his lips a tight line.

He can tell by the thin, stretched silence between them what Crowley is thinking. He assumes it is an approximation of, _so we’re just going to ignore what I said then?_

Aziraphale stares down into the deep liquid of his eyes and brushes the back of his knuckles against a damp cheek.

_Yes. Yes, we are_.

The kettle begins whistling behind them and Aziraphale pulls himself away.

“Sugar?” He asks, knowing the answer.

“No,” is the perfunctory response.

After six-thousand years you know how the one dearest to you takes their tea. You know how they don’t have much of a sweet-tooth, how they like things that are dark and bitter and brined. You know, for instance, that they will push the boundaries of what you can offer, and that they come to expect a familiar rebut.

It is as natural to them as breathing— the familiar side-step, an easy tango.

Aziraphale presses the warm cup into Crowley’s hands.

“Drink up, it’ll help you get warm,” he says, even as the room is incandescently hot with Crowley’s raw emotion.

Crowley stares down into his tea cup for a long while, studiously quiet, and then finally takes a sip.

* * *

Crowley likes the nighttime, has always had a preference for when it was dark and quiet and private. Nighttime, he thinks, is a time without obligation.

He digs around in his breast pocket for a cigarette, finds one, lights it with a bit of hellfire jumping out from his thumb. He still feels a bit shaky, unsteady— as if he has just been treading water for hours and is finally on solid ground. Equal parts exhaustion and relief.

It is a mostly overcast night, but there are the promises of stars winking out from under a layer of cloud-cover, his somethings from bits of nothing.

“Make something infinite,” he murmurs to himself, to the rustling branches, to the lit end of his cigarette.

It is nearing the end of October, and the air here has become unmistakably crisp. Down below him, in the transitory villages that the military camps become, he can see the warm glow of communal fires, the cooler light of the carbon arc lanterns throwing tall shadows into the hills.

He sucks in a long drag off his cigarette, feeling his lungs expand fully, _finally_, and is hit with a pang of nostalgia— of missing the only place he ever really called home.

He always liked England this time of year— especially around the late 1700s, when children and young men going guising really became a hit, carving out turnips and lighting them from the inside with a candle. Aziraphale enjoyed the holiday far more than he ever let on— But Crowley knew. After all, how many times a year was it socially acceptable to wear a ridiculous costume and demand food from strangers?

“You’re smoking again?” Comes a voice from his right.

“I never quit,” Crowley says, and offers it to him.

He watches Aziraphale’s lips part to take the cigarette into his mouth, and then forces himself to swallow and look away.

_To think that I know what those lips feel like on my—_

“It’s rather beautiful out,” the angel remarks, looking down at the lights below them, “a bit spooky, though.”

“Nearly Hallowe’en,” he says.

“What shall we guise as this year?” The angel asks, drawing another inhale off the cigarette.

“Hm,” Crowley starts, turning to look at the angel next to him, “I was thinking I could be a devil, you know, really branch out. Get some horns.”

Aziraphale turns to him and pulls the cigarette out of his mouth, exhaling over his shoulder.

“Oh yes, that’s very good. A tail would suit you.”

“I thought perhaps you could be an angel, pop on a halo, wear white.”

Aziraphale hums his agreement and reaches up to press the cigarette back into Crowley’s mouth, his fingers pressing against his lips.

“What do you think?” He mouths around the paper between his lips, “good idea?”

“I don’t think anyone will recognize us,” Aziraphale agrees.

“Excellent.”

He puffs a long exhale of smoke into the night sky.

“I miss chocolate,” Aziraphale sighs.

“We will get you some, when we go back,” Crowley starts, looking up at a particularly bright spot in the sky, probably Saturn, “not much longer out here.”

There is the warm measure of sound weaving through the trees, bouncing off of rock.

“Do you hear that?” Aziraphale asks, peering out into the darkness.

“Yeah,” he replies.

It is not uncommon for the troops to play music, but rarely does it happen this late at night.

“It’s finally not raining. I guess they figured it’s a good time for some evening R&R.”

“I’d hardly call it R&R,” Aziraphale says, still staring down at the light beneath them, “have you seen what they are calling beds? They might as well sleep on the floor.”

“You could always miracle them something softer,” he suggests, flicking his fingers to remove the pile-up of ash.

“I’m not sure how that would get explained,” Aziraphale wrings his hands together, “although that idea did cross my mind.”

Crowley just smiles at him, all of him, the lovely soft shoulders and the pale head and the messy curls. He flicks the cigarette to the ground and stamps out the embers with his heel, a lump in his throat that has nothing to do with fear.

He steps up to the angel, still looking benevolently down on the tiny humans below, and brushes his hand against his elbow.

The face that looks back at him is surprised at the touch, and then relieved, a smile lifting the corners of his eyes into tiny twinkling depths.

And Crowley has never, in all of his six-thousand years on this earth, after countless tomes of sappy poetry and overly-sentimental love songs spouting the existence of such things, has never seen an eye actually _twinkle_.

But here and now he finally beholds it, an answer to the romance poetry he may or may not have read. And if the stars in the firmament above him are twinkling in this moment too he does not notice, because there is nothing else in existence but the angel in front of him and the music lilting through the trees.

“Dance with me?”

If there was room in his heart to panic he surely would have been— but there’s no space— not with Aziraphale in front of him, with that smile that lights up the night sky.

Crowley has always wanted to dance with the angel, ever since such a thing had first been invented. He remembers, acutely, lounging in great pagan temples, watching the priestesses writhe in a gross approximation to what would later turn into quadrilles, to waltzes, to tangos— all the while wondering what it would be like to see the angel do the same.

The smile doesn’t waver as he takes Crowley’s hand, glances around the empty hills, “okay,” Aziraphale breathes, and folds himself into his arms.

The angel is soft and solid and _warm_. He smells ever so faintly of the cigarette he had been smoking, but also like bread and sunshine, like warm cotton and honey.

“You, uhm,” Crowley clears his throat, “you might have to lead. I don’t exactly know how to do this.”

Aziraphale looks enticingly pink about his cheeks and ears, the very tip of his nose reddening in the cool air. Crowley has the sudden overwhelming desire to kiss it.

“I would love to,” he says, and threads their fingers together, his other hand smoothing Crowley’s palm to his hip.

The entire night air is thrumming with a dull sweet energy, the music below so far off and tinny they had to strain to hear it.

“Like this,” he instructs, and takes a step back, pulling Crowley with him.

They blend into an easy step, a tiny circle of shared footsteps. Crowley’s heart has taken up residence somewhere in his throat, hammering away there until it drowns out the tempo of the music below.

Aziraphale is humming the song, occasionally singing words, something about sunshine, staring at up him all the while.

“How did you learn how to do this?” He asks. For all the angel could be a bit of a mess, a bit up tight, he is marvelously fluid at dancing.

“Remember those hobbies I was telling you about?”

Crowley inches them closer, the hand on the angel’s hip tightening slightly.

“You took up _dancing_?”

Aziraphale steps into the hold, resting his mouth against Crowley’s shoulder. He puffs out a hot rhythm of breaths there as they sway into less of a dance and more of an upright cradling.

“Mmhmm,” he hums, “I was quite good at it.”

“I can see that.”

“The gavotte. It was quite popular then.”

“Quite popular _when_?” Crowley asks into the fluffy white hair.

“When you were busy sleeping.”

“Okay, let me rephrase, quite popular _where_?”

“The 100 Guineas Club. Portland Place.”

Crowley stops swaying to look down at Aziraphale, an eyebrow cocked.

“The… the—“

“Is there a problem?” Aziraphale asks, pure sweetness.

“Uh, nh, no.”

Crowley swallows, his mind racing, “isn’t that a—“

“Yes,” Aziraphale answers, cutting him off.

“Did you know—”

“Not at first. But I eventually figured it out.”

He wraps his long arms around Aziraphale’s warm frame and pulls him close, his chin resting somewhere near the top of his head.

_Will you ever stop surprising me?_

He can feel the angel breathing, their bellies pressing together with each inhale, their hearts beating in silent conversation.

“We should probably turn in,” Aziraphale says against his shoulder, “your arms feel quite cold.”

As if Crowley, with his heart in his throat and his hands wrapped around an angel could even fathom such a thing as temperature.

“Just another minute,” Crowley says, and if his voice is a bit hoarse when he says it or his fingers grip a bit tighter Aziraphale does not mention it, “_please_.”

“Of course,” Aziraphale says, smoothing his free arm down Crowley’s back, “of course.”

* * *

“I am _freezing_.”

“It is a bit cold tonight,” Aziraphale remarks, as if the frigid temperatures are nothing more than a mild inconvenience.

“A _bit cold_? A _bit_?” Crowley’s teeth are vibrating together, the tips of his ears are numb.

Aziraphale looks remarkably unbothered by the cold wind that is leaking into their tent. He had told Crowley once that angels were made of strong stuff, pure resiliency— they resisted asking questions, resisted temptations, resisted anything that occurred outside of their sphere of faith. Apparently, they also resist the discomforts of outside stimuli.

“Really, it’s not so terrible, Crowley—“

“This is worse than Wessex.”

“I didn’t find Wessex to be that awful,” Aziraphale says, looking up from his book.

“Of course you didn’t. You used about forty miracles making that tent water-tight and another dozen creating a fire that was somehow both incredibly hot _and_ incapable of burning canvas.”

Aziraphale smiles at the memory, “back when I was very irresponsible with the number of miracles I used.”

_“_You know, angel, I am honestly surprised no one has accused you of being a witch throughout the ages,” Crowley is trying desperately to seal off any exterior air-flow under his blanket.

Aziraphale sucks at his front teeth, “like they have _you_, dear boy?”

“Yes, but _I_ deserve it. If I never got called a witch I would take that as a serious affront to my capabilities as a demon.”

“_What _are you doing?” Aziraphale has taken off his glasses and is looking over at him.

“I’m trying to get warm.”

The only bit of Crowley that is visible is a shock of red hair and a pair of glowing yellow eyes, the remainder of him is huddled under a lumpy mountain of blankets. Something in Aziraphale’s heart twists at the visual— he looks, _strangely,_ adorable.

“I did tell you that we ought to go inside sooner,” Aziraphale chides, ignoring the odd cadence of his heartbeat, “I believe you’ve caught a chill.”

“I’m not sorry about it,” Crowley says, and closes his eyes, sticking his nose into the blanket.

A steady howling wind is licking up the sides of the tent, the walls shuddering. They might as well be made of tissue paper, for all that they do not keep the elements out. Aziraphale stares at them, figuring a miracle could make them better, more airtight. But then, he realizes, it would be quite the missed opportunity.

Aziraphale sighs, something weary and resigned in it, and closes his book.

“Well, go on then,” he says.

Crowley pries open an eye to look at him.

“What?” 

“Move over.”

Aziraphale is shrugging out of his jacket, his shoes already off.

“Wh—“

“Come on then,” Aziraphale says, impatient, and tosses the blankets back to nearly his ankles.

“_Hey_!” Crowley yelps, his carefully curated warm air released to the room, “I’m trying to get warm over here.”

“You’ll find it easier with some extra body heat, I imagine,” Aziraphale says, somehow prim even now, wedging himself into a bed that is really only meant for one person. “I’m tired of listening to you complain.”

Aziraphale can feel Crowley begin to argue again as he climbs in behind him, and then watches, positively _thrilled_, as he presses all of his front to all of Crowley’s back, and the demon’s mouth closes with a snap.

_What a fantastic way to shut you up,_ he thinks, and then, out of the back of his mind— _The other ways aren’t bad either_. And he can feel his face flushing with memories of his tiled bathroom floor, nothing but steam between them, a tongue that was inhumanly long. He shifts his hips a bit back, just in case, putting some room between them.

“Nh, where’d you go,” comes the murmured protest, Crowley shifting towards him, rolling until they were face to face.

“Just here,” Aziraphale murmurs back, their noses nearly touching, reaching up and palming a chilled ear, “any better?”

Crowley’s eyes are, what was the word he had used?—_magical_— up this close. Liquid pools of golden honey. The vertical pupil is wide in the dim light, a thin oval of infinite black. 

“I’ve forgotten I’m cold,” he says without a smile, because he isn’t joking.

Aziraphale rubs his free hand along Crowley’s arm, feeling the whipcord strength of it, the spareness, the smooth skin.

_No wonder you’re so cold, you haven’t any weight on your bones._

“Can I—?” Crowley starts, his throat working.

“Can you what?” Aziraphale asks.

There is a silent stretch of heartbeats, of wind on the walls.

“Can I hold you?” Comes the quiet question.

Aziraphale holds his gaze for a moment, basking in the openness, the trust, the tiny hope. The heat of Crowley’s emotion is filling the room again, until he is buoyed up by the warmth of it, the effervescence of a six-thousand year old love that still managed to feel young.

“Yes,” he sighs, and rolls over, his back folding neatly into Crowley’s lean chest, their hips locked together.

There is a tiny sound behind him, an unsteady lowering of a forehead to his shoulder, and then—

“_Thank you_.”

The words are hot against his shoulder, a stark contrast to the striking chill of his extremities. His feet are like frigid cubes of ice, some failing of his circulatory system to be sure.

But then again, Aziraphale thinks, wiggling back slightly into Crowley’s hips, perhaps not a failure at all.

“Sorry,” comes the mumbled reply behind him, thick with embarrassment.

“What for?” Aziraphale asks, and presses back into him experimentally.

“Nngh,” says Crowley.

Aziraphale has become somewhat adept at reading Crowley’s nonverbal sounds— for all the demon is something of a walking almanac of them. There is _ngk_ for when he is startled, and _nh, _for when he is frustrated, and _nngh, _for when he is embarrassed.

“Now then, it isn’t so bad,” Aziraphale breathes, shifting up against the hard heat at the small of his back.

_I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be better than this—_

But then a moan rips out of Crowley’s throat and Aziraphale forgets how to breathe.

There is a nose pressed into the nape of his neck, warm breath against his skin. Crowley is grinding up against him in tiny, half-aborted movements, something unsteady and uncertain in the flex of his hips, as if they were asking silent questions— _is this ok? Is this ok?_

“Yes,” he breathes in reply, closing his eyes. It is remarkably warm in the bed, at least to Aziraphale, smothered by the heat of Crowley’s desire, his burdening emotions, the physical blankets piled on top of them.

He snakes a hand around behind him, to the front of Crowley’s pants, fumbles at the fly there.

“This might be better without clothes,” he murmurs, and reaches in to take the velvet heat of him into his palm.

“_Oh_,” is the only broken sound in the room, Crowley’s forehead pressed to his shoulder, his lips branding hot kisses into the skin there. “_Angel_, _angel, angel_.”

“Shh,” Aziraphale breathes, feeling the edge of nervous energy, the ever-present fear that they might get caught, “it’s ok.”

There’s a hand grasping at the front of him, desperate, and Aziraphale lets him fumble there, something pure and innocent and endlessly charming about his urgency.

“Want you so bad,” Crowley pants, a hand dipping in to wrap around him— and then Aziraphale stops feeling scared.

“Crowley,” he gasps, and squeezes him in turn.

“Angel,” comes the desperate response, “_fuck_.”

There is a hand slithering under the pillow, under his head, up and around to cradle about his chest, pulling him in close. Aziraphale grips the hand with his own, guiding it up to his mouth.

“Feel good?” He asks, out of breath, torn between rocking up into Crowley’s hand or backward against his cock.

“Unh, so good. _Oh fuck_. So good.”

Aziraphale has the striking and sudden desire to have something, _anything_, in his mouth. He wants to bite on something, suck on it, his teeth aching in some strange symbiotic need. He pulls the index finger of Crowley’s hand up and away from its brothers, brings it to his lips.

Crowley is mindless behind him, rutting up against the small of his back, panting into his neck. He can feel the sweat beading there, dampening the curls to suction against his skin.

His tongue comes out first to dart at the finger in his hand, tastes the cold salt of Crowley’s skin. Crowley hardly seems to have noticed, alternating between licking and kissing the wet skin on his neck, grinding up into the hand he still has wedged behind his back.

“Crowley,” he whispers into the hand by his face, _love you, love you, love you._

_“Angel_,” is the answered response, hazy and unfocused. Encouraged by Crowley’s abandon, his utter lack of understanding reality in this moment— Aziraphale lifts his finger up to his lips, and _sucks_.

There is a high-pitched, keening wail behind him, loud enough that it hurts his ear. Aziraphale scrapes his teeth along the finger in his mouth, strangely comforted by it, grounded. He pulls the index finger out of his mouth and moves onto the middle one, swallowing around it, trying to capture the taste of him.

The sound of Crowley’s pleasure might actually be the death of him— the broken cries, the innocent whines— something so shockingly naive about them, like he is surprised at his own bliss, unhinged by it, alarmed that he is capable of feeling it at all.

“Angel, _wait_, I’m—“

“_Oh,”_ Aziraphale breathes, releasing the finger in his mouth, feeling suddenly at the edge himself, Crowley’s hand tightening its grip, “Crowley,_ yes_, darling— oh.”

The world goes strangely white at the edges, static and charged— the electric buzz of pleasure licking up his body as his world narrows to Crowley’s voice at his neck, his hand between his legs, his own heat splashing up somewhere on his belly.

There is a long, incoherent cry, teeth at his shoulder, pressing but not hurting— _never_ hurting— and then the hot spill of liquid up his back, high enough that he can feel it hit the base of his shoulder blades through his shirt.

Aziraphale holds his hand around him tightly, letting him thrust weakly against it, his chest stuttering with the aftershocks.

There is air in the room again, and Aziraphale can breathe, the tide of emotion ebbing.

“_Angel_,” is the whispered voice behind him, pressing kisses against his neck.

_I love you_.

Crowley doesn’t need to say it— Aziraphale can _feel it_, feel the way it makes the air between them bubble like champagne, effused with joy.

_I love you, too_, he answers back, internal, sudden dread settling in his chest.

“We should be more careful,” he says instead, pressing kisses into the hand he was holding. The unmitigated joy of Crowley’s emotion is dimming to the bleak anxiety in his veins, the sudden regret. Not for Crowley, _never_ for Crowley— but maybe for what they did together, the tight-rope walk of together-but-separate, love-but-not-love.

He thinks of Crowley asking for holy water— the entire purpose behind that simple loaded request borne out of the fear that what they did together would warrant a suicide pill— because suicide by holy-water is a better alternative than anything Hell could dream up as a punishment for _this_, this magnetic pull between them. As if they had any control over it— as if they could deny this burning attraction forever, as if things as monumental as glaciers didn’t eventually yield to heat and time, gravity and life— gravity itself just a law of attraction, two forces pulling and pushing against each other, moons locked in an orbit they couldn’t shy apart from.

“We probably shouldn’t do that again,” he says, as if expecting that his admitting that would relay his anxiety, calm the dread that swept like bullet-fire through his bloodstream, put the genie back in the bottle.

Crowley is oddly still behind him, and there is sweat between them, rapidly chilling.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m scared.”

It is quiet for a long and terrible moment.

“I am too,” Crowley says at last, and then rolls away from him.

Aziraphale remembers when he first saw Crowley after all those years, in Fort Vaux, on the front lines of Verdun. How he stood smoking in the infirmary, a letter in his pocket and a chip on his shoulder, and had said, “they were together for a time, maybe that’s enough”.

Aziraphale decides, right then and there, lying on that tiny cot that shouldn’t have held more than one fully-grown man but somehow managed to fit two immortal beings, that it _isn’t_ enough. Not at all.

* * *

_We really shouldn’t do that again._

He grinds his teeth together, the heat of frustration and anger and regret rolling off of him in tangible waves. He stalks past the medic tents, the soldier barracks, gauze strips going missing, bullets rolling along the ground and out of sight. If the doors to the armories lock on their own accord, from the inside, it is not a conscious effort, just a flex of barely withheld demonic rage, latent satanic impulses.

There is something behind his eyes, some small cornered animal. He pushes back at it, willing himself not to cry, not _yet_, not before he has boiled off the burning anger of himself.

He snaps his fingers and the ambulances in front of him sink, their tires deflated into nothing.

_We really shouldn’t do that again_.

Will he ever not hear Aziraphale’s voice in his head?

_That’s fine. We don’t have to. Just tell me that you feel it too. Answer me back. Please please please I am begging you. I feel like I am speaking a language that you cannot understand. How long do I have to be a fucking tourist in your life? Let me learn your language, teach me how to speak._

He stops along the edge of a river, tilting his head back toward the sky, and _breathes_.

_When will I not have to throw myself on your altar, begging for crumbs?_

He closes his eyes and can hear God’s voice in his head, from oh so long ago, the only thing he remembers of a time before his fall.

_Make something infinite_.

_I have_, he thinks wildly, _I already have_. He has something absolute, incalculable, bottomless— an infinite capacity to love without hesitation or conditions. He has loved Aziraphale before he knew what to call it, another failure of language, has loved him through centuries together, decades apart, through famines and floods and fugue states of trying to forget about the angel, sleep through the misery.

_He’s scared_, he thinks, and a tiny glowing thing, a thread of understanding and unconditionality weaves up through his anger— a single grain of the thing he has sustained himself on for thousands of years, the emotional famines— _hope_.

Crowley inhales, exhales, the frustration draining out of him like a sieve.

_A bit of something_, he thinks, gripping onto that hope with a desperation that burned in its intensity, _from nothing._

**Author's Note:**

> The song they are listening to was a beloved tune of 1913 called The Sunshine in Your Smile.
> 
> The Battle of Caporetto is the backdrop from A Farewell to Arms. And I may have popped a lil Easter egg from the novel in there.
> 
> As always, come talk to me on Tumblr @ racketghost.tumblr.com  
The darling [boughofawillowtree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boughofawillowtree) made a fabulous playlist for this series that you can check out [here!](https://desperateground.tumblr.com/post/188374219310/strange-moons-playlist)


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